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Monthly Archives: August 2018

Researchers in China have meticulously documented a reason for diminished cognition – stupidity – in old men: bad air. Seriously. Air pollution, including the PM 2.5 fine particulates, has been shown to impair cognition, especially in the elderly. We find that long-term exposure to air pollution impedes cognitive performance in verbal and math tests. We…

It’s impossible for anyone to keep up with the constant stream of tweets that pour out of President Trump, and WC declines to make the attempt. But it can be instructive to drill down and see what triggered a specific tweet. Let’s have a look at Trump’s August 28 claim that Google has a liberal…

While much of climate science is pretty firmly established, whatever Donald Trump may think, climatologists are still puzzling out some of the details. And some of those details are turning out to be very important. Feedback is one such critical detail. Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of…

Or at least partly right. Okay, maybe in a way he never intended. Two weeks ago, in a semi-coherent speech at a fundraiser hosted by the chairman of Nathan’s Hot Dogs, President Trump called “windmills” “an inferior source of energy.” The same day, the Department of Energy released its annual Wind Technology Report (PDF). The Report is…

Paul Krugman likens it to the definition of “chutzpah”: kill your parents and then beg the court for mercy, on the grounds you are an orphan. But that’s the essence of the Republican strategy: create huge deficits with tax cuts and then, in the name of dealing with the problem you’ve created, slash social service…

It’s hard to be outdoors in the Western United States right now. It seems as if we have been in a cloud of wildfire smoke for months. Your eyes water and the back of your throat burns. Your clothes smell like a a drowned campfire. And thousands of fires have reduced too much of Western…

(This week’s Bird of the Week is late; WC was off the internet for a while.) Another species from southern Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands, the Dolphin Gull is a smaller member of the Larids, the gull family. With its bright orange-red bill and legs, and yellow eye, it is possibly the easiest gull…